They're Playing A Song Of The Century
by S4ltv1n3g4r
Summary: Fanfic of Green Day's album 21st Century Breakdown. In a dystopian future ruled by religious extremism, Christian and Gloria fight for freedom of thought and cling to thoughts of freedom.
1. The Freedom To Obey

A/N: Hokey dokes, so, I listened to 21st Century Breakdown in its entirety with my dad tonight, and we were interpreting it. It was epic.

Anyway, this is my interpretation. This first part goes from Song Of The Century to Viva La Gloria.

It gets more exciting, I promise.

Songs and characters (c) Green Day.

* * *

**Chapter 1- The Freedom To Obey**

The rain poured heavily on the erect skyscrapers and street-corner kiosks, as if the Gods were pissing on the heads of the civilians and conformists who littered the structured streets like debris. Props of the grandeur of the government were peeling from the walls of buildings and being trodden on under the feet of the working class on their way back from their lunch break. The scene was mundane and simple, a comfortable but loveless marriage between a nation ruled by religious ideals and her acquiescing countrymen--until the shatter of glass tore through the silence.

In a school parking lot in the heart of New York, a student with a baseball bat thrashed a teacher's car, bits of windshield clinging to his uniform, which wasn't much of a uniform anymore after all of his alterations to it. The car wasn't much of a car anymore, either.

Christian had tried to fit in, to do what he was supposed to--scratch that, he totally hadn't. The world was moving at a pace too slow for him, the peace imposed on him by the masses allowing him only the freedom to obey. Frankly, he was sick of it. He was sick of the long hours at Catholic school and the bullies who shoved his head in the toilet when no one was looking. He was sick of being graded on his thoughts and scolded for his lack of strong beliefs. He was sick of missing his fix because another one of his dealers had been publicly executed as an example to the rest of society.

So he fought back the only way he knew how: with violence and vandalism. Taking a step back, he admired his handiwork, nodding approvingly, until something pricked him in the arm. A syringe full of anesthesia.

"Oh, come on," he groaned as he looked up to see a government official standing over him. He'd heard that these people didn't warn before taking people in for 'discipline', but he didn't think punishment in this city was that austere. "You've got to be kidding." He collapsed to the ground and the world spun before going black.

* * *

"WAKE THE FUCK UP, YOU LITTLE MAGGOT!"

Christian was jostled awake by a sharp screech, followed by a blow to the head. A woman, his interrogator, had slammed him against the wall of a dreary, concrete wall.

"Wh-wha--?" He looked around, first at the woman in the crisp gray uniform, then at the chain that secured his cuffed wrist to a metal desk.

"Finally. I thought you'd never come around for questioning," the interrogator snapped. "Let's get the formalities out of the way: at one in the afternoon today, you were caught disturbing the peace, yada yada yada, and now I'm going to need to ask you a few questions, like where you live, what your parents do, whether or not you had any accomplices, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, and we'll have to keep tabs on you for the next few weeks to make sure you don't do any more naughty things." She gave a little snort at her own words and pulled up a chair across from him, sitting backwards in it with one leg on each side of the backrest. "Before we get through any of that, though..."

She drew a gun and shot at him, the bullet barely grazing his shoulder.

"Aaugh! What was that for?"

"It gets boring," said the interrogator. "There's nothing to do in this dump but abuse you nasty dissenters. So, let's get this paperwork out of the way, shall we?"

She pulled a stack of forms seemingly out of nowhere. Probably out her slimy ass, thought Christian with a smirk. Before she could do anything with them, though, the sound of feedback, followed by a megaphone-amplified female voice, pervaded the silence and made the interrogator drop everything she was holding.

"People of America, you are in chains!" yelled the girl outside the disciplinary compound's walls.

No shit, Christian thought.

"The government forces God and Peace into your lives, controls you through the fear of damnation, and demands that you get along. You think you live without enemies, but your enemy is the very ruling body that enslaves your minds!"

There were cheers in the background, and she went on, with never-wavering enthusiasm, "We've lived without wars for too long! We've grown compliant and cowardly! We've lost ourselves! Those leaders in their fiftieth-story offices call me a demon. Well, I say, let there be demons! Corruption is already sitting on our heads--let it be exposed! Let there be revolution!"

"Bloody rioteers, always making a bloody ruckus around these parts," the interrogator grumbled. "Sit tight, you little worm, I'll be back before you know it." She left the room to deal with the situation, and that's when Christian noticed that, along with her paperwork, she had also dropped her keys.

He scooped them up and uncuffed himself, skirting down hallways carefully and quietly, looking over his shoulder every few seconds with a sense of paranoia. Finally, after navigating his way through the government complex, he emerged on the outside, where the light was fading with the sunset.

There, he found his interrogator dead, her wind- and food-pipes ripped clear out of her throat. His eyes followed a trail of blood to a slender white hand, which was attached to an arm, a shoulder, a neck, and a face, its lower half covered with a piece of an American flag worn like a bandana.

"Uh..." he uttered.

The girl with the bloody hands stowed a switchblade in her pocket. "I had to do it. It was her or me, and these government freaks have tried to kill me too many times for me to give them the benefit of the doubt."

"Wh-who are you?" asked Christian.

The girl turned to the wall and scrawled messy letters in the interrogator's blood over a poster advertising 'Unity and Faith'. "I'm all that remains of the American Spirit, kid. I'm the revolutionary, the rebel, the next Washington. But for all practical purposes, you may call me..."

GLORIA, read the graffiti on the wall.

"Come on," she said, taking his hand in one of hers, which was still caked with blood. "We should go. Everyone else who was in the riot already left, and the panic is dying down--if they find you, they'll kill you."

"But the guard said they were just going to keep tabs."

"No, they were going to kill you," said Gloria. "Trust me. I used to believe their bullshit, too, until I found myself where you just were."

"Guess you saved my life, then. Thanks. Name's Christian, by the way."

"Yeah, sure it is." She dragged him into a thicket of trees and led him down a meandering path she seemed to be making up on the spot. "Look, can you pick up the pace? It's getting dark. If they find us and kill us now, no one will ever know."

Christian sped up and kept his eyes on Gloria's bobbing ponytail, too troubled to look back this time.


	2. Like Refugees

A/N: Hokay, so, disclaimer, I don't own the songs/characters/etc. This chapter concludes Act 1, and things will get more exciting in Act 2, I promise. Appy-polly-logies for being a little rusty in the fanfic-writing area, I haven't done this in a while.

* * *

**Chapter 2 - Like Refugees  
**

The journey ended at the mouth of an abandoned subway station. "What is this?" Christian asked as he followed Gloria down the steps and into the humid underbelly of the city.

"They shut this station down after terrorists tried to launch an attack from here," Gloria explained. "Now, it's my headquarters."

"Your headquarters?"

"I told you I was a revolutionary, didn't I?"

He looked around the station, surprised to see a substantial number of haggard faces looking back at him. "You didn't tell me you had a cult following."

She gave a slight snicker at his choice of words. "Freedom of thought is a powerful rallying cry," she said. "Damn, it's hot in here…"

She pulled the tattered flag from around her face, exposing a jagged slash down her right cheek that was crudely stitched together. She'd probably fixed it up herself in front of a mirror.

Christian gasped in shock. "What happened to you?"

"What?" asked Gloria. "Oh. This." She fingered the scar, thinking back as if she'd forgotten it was there. "Got in a scuffle with a police officer last week."

"Just last week?" Christian repeated. He started to bring a hand up to brush the hair out of her face and get a closer look at her injury, but she slapped it away.

"Don't touch me." Her tone wasn't angry, though, and there was something like mischievous amusement sparking in her eyes. She pulled a couple of beers out of a nearby cooler whose ice was melting and spilling onto the floor in a slushy mess and tossed one to him. "Come here, little boy. I want to tell you a story."

"You got a bottle opener?"

"Nope." She hopped over the edge of the pavement and sat down cross-legged on the tracks that hadn't seen a train in years, cracking off the top of the bottle on the rusty metal and pouring the liquid into her mouth from the broken glass. "They teach you history in school, Christian?"

"A little," he said. "Columbus, and stuff."

"I bet they didn't teach you that in the previous generation, another world war almost broke out," she told him.

"A—a what?"

"Yeah, guess who started it? The good ol' U.S. of A-holes," Gloria snickered. "The start of the twenty-first century was marked by a massive arms race that completely depleted half of the world's funds. As a result, we've imperialized several nations, and to make sure things don't get out of hand again, we enforce peace. It seems like a sound plan, but it's actually quite sick."

Christian looked quizzically at her. This was all beginning to sound like one big overblown conspiracy theory. "How do you know all this?"

"It's obvious, for those who bother to go digging for the truth," she shrugged. He glanced from side to side, and she sighed. "You think I'm crazy, don't you?"

"Well, not exactly…"

"Your mother's probably worried sick about you, kid. Go home before she files a missing person's report."

"Are you kicking me out?" Christian asked incredulously.

"I thought you were different," said Gloria.

"I am."

"No, you're just like the rest of the perverse American culture. Soulless and lobotomized," she muttered. "Get out of here. And come back when you find the other half of your brain."

"But I thought you said they would try to kill me."

"They've probably given up. The government has a short attention span."

* * *

Christian stepped back into the world, the hushed whispers of revolution and the glorious way-things-used-to-be fading behind him, replaced by loud proclamations of the ever-powerful grace of God.

He took a subway—one that was actually still in operation—back home, quite surprised to find his parents still awake at the ungodly hour of three in the morning. They were sitting at the kitchen table, his mother holding an envelope, his father holding a bag of cocaine.

Well, shit.

"I can explain…" he stammered.

"Explain?" repeated his mother. "Try explaining how you got in trouble with the law and ended up getting kicked out of school! Explain the drugs we found in your room, why don't you try explaining that?"

Alright, so maybe he couldn't explain. But he still deserved some sort of chance to make his case, right?

Apparently not. "You get out of this house, young man!" yelled his father. "You're not going to live under my roof like this! We've tried to straighten you out, but you've proven completely hopeless!"

Christian's teeth ground together in anger. "Fine," he snarled, snatching his bag of coke and walking out the door. "I've got better places to be than this dump anyway."

He walked three blocks away from his dwelling, then paced the street for an hour until his parents were asleep. Then, he sneaked through the window of his room and filled his pockets with the three hundred dollars he kept stashed under the floorboards, On a scrap of paper, he scribbled a hasty note:

_You were right all along. Well, I'm not sure if you were, but it doesn't matter. What does is, you're all that I've got now. Expect me back at the station in a few days—I'm going to lay low for a while before heading back. _

He stuffed it into an envelope, penned GLORIA on the backside of it, and headed back out into the street.

That morning in Central Park, he spotted a fellow on the bench reading the Holy Bible upside-down, a sort of code that non-believers used so that they could recognize each other and talk about dissent without worrying about government intervention. Christian tossed the envelope in front of the man's text. "Do you know her?"

The man nodded his head, up and down, up and down. "No."

"Was that a yes or a no?"

"It's dangerous to be overheard talking about her," said the man, spelling out Y-E-S in standard American sign language.

"Make sure this letter gets to her."

* * *

On the third day after his disownment, Christian slunk into Gloria's subway station and snuck up behind her. She was asleep on the steps, his letter in her hand.

"Hey."

"WHAA—oh, it's just you, Christian. Don't scare me like that!" she snapped.

"Sorry."

"So, you decided to come back after all?"

"I would have sooner or later," said Christian, realizing as he said the words that they were true: he'd grown so disillusioned with his inferno of a life that he was bound to break away from society eventually.

"Do you still think I'm crazy?" asked Gloria.

"No," Christian shook his head. "I think you're serious about this whole revolution thing. And I think I am, too."

Gloria's sharp-eyed expression softened. "It's dangerous out here in the front lines. You could be killed, you know."

"I know," he replied. "But it's alright. As long as for your—the—cause. Because…call me crazy, but I think I lo…"

"You think you what?"

"Nothing," he lied, sitting next to her and resting his weary head on her shoulder. "I lost my train of thought. It must be the coke."

"Fair enough," she shrugged. "Want to know a secret?"

"What?"

"I was hoping you'd be coming back soon," Gloria confessed, patting his head affectionately. "I'm glad you did, and I'm sorry we got off on the wrong foot."

"Don't worry 'bout it," Christian yawned. His eyes fluttered shut and he drifted off next to her, making up for the last few sleepless nights.


	3. A Prayer For The Family

**Chapter 3 - A Prayer For The Family**

Christian's first tastes of revolution were mere appetizers—during his first few weeks with Gloria's resistance, he didn't participate in much more than the occasional shootout and theft. Gloria insisted that, after his escape from society, he should remain in the shadows for a while. "Let the rest of us handle the heavy duty demonstrations," she said, "and after some time passes, then you can reappear as a rebel."

He, however, had other plans.

In the dead of night, he gathered up any flammable liquid he could find, even going so far as to steal the gas out of a parked car and siphon it into a bucket. Then, he shook Gloria awake. "Hey Gloria, I want to show you something."

"Huh?" she groggily bumbled. "What time is it?"

"Who knows?" Christian replied. "Who cares? Come on, you've got to see this."

"I do?"

"Yeah. It's that important."

As she slowly rejoined the waking world, withdrawing her bandana from an inside pocket and sloppily securing it around her face, he led her, his arm around her shoulder, out of the station and down several blocks, until they found themselves in front of a large, impressive, and empty stone building.

"What is this?" asked Gloria, her voice still raspy with fatigue.

"The church I used to go to," said Christian. "The one that used to control my family."

"Why doesn't it control them anymore?"

Christian picked up his bucket of gasoline and threw its contents onto the buildings, smashing the window with the empty bucket. "This is why." He poured bottles of acetone stolen from the pharmacy onto the grass, flung rocks through the rest of the windows, lit a match, and let the flames roar across the landscape. Gloria let out a squeal of shock.

"I thought I told you to stay inconspicuous for a while!"

"Relax, no one's going to find out," Christian smirked.

"Of course they will! You just lit up the biggest church in the city!"

"Yeah, well, it's about time someone did. If nobody stands up and fights, nothing will ever change, now, will it? There's no such thing as a silent revolution."

Gloria smiled in approval in spite of herself. "You learn fast, kid," she said, patting his head like the proud teacher she was.

An alarm sounded in the street as the blaze intensified, but by the time the cops arrived on the scene, Christian and Gloria were already gone.

* * *

Christian's picture plastered the city walls on the 'wanted' posters that now joined the propaganda. A board meeting of frustrated government officials convened to decide what to do about him, its leader reclining in a swiveling office chair and throwing darts at a big, blown-up copy of the wanted ad. "I want this newest threat killed," he growled.

"And how do you suppose we're going to accomplish that, Mr. Greene?" said one of his subordinates. "He hasn't been sighted anywhere near his home in weeks, all of his recent movements completely contradict everything his records suggest about what he would do—"

"We get to him through the girl," a new voice rang out over the discussion. A man stepped forward from the crowd, in many ways just another extension of the homogenous blob of people. His slicked-back hair and monkey-suit marked him as one of them, but there was a hawk-like sharpness to his eyes that none of the others possessed.

He slapped a photograph of Gloria, the infamous rioteer, on the table in front of his comrades. "It's obvious that she's taken him in. We get rid of her, and taking him out will be a breeze."

Greene raised his eyebrow at the young law-enforcement neophyte. "Really, Adam? You would betray your own sister?"

Adam rolled his eyes in annoyance as a few of his coworkers murmured about him and his relationship to 'that blaspheming scum'. When the whispers died down, he turned to Greene and said, "Betray? Hardly. I'd be doing her a favor if I could bring her back to her senses and restore her faith."

"Sounds like a decent enough plan," someone nodded. "But how are we going to find her?"

Adam's face contorted into a twisted smile. "I think I have an idea."

* * *

Gloria's parents were assaulted by policemen in their home as they were eating dinner. Adam was at the table with them that evening: he just happened to be in the neighborhood and decided to invite himself over. One of the officers threw the mother against the wall and held her at gunpoint. "Where is she?"

"Who?" the woman whimpered, her wide eyes trained on the barrel of the gun.

"You know very well who we're talking about!" snapped her assailant. "That little demon you're trying to pass off as a daughter!"

The other policeman pinned Adam and Gloria's father onto the table, pressing the muzzle of a revolver to his head. "Please," he said, "let us go, we don't know anything…"

"Mom!" Adam shouted, rushing over to his mother and placing himself between her and the officer's firearm. Whispering low so that no one but she could hear, he told her, "I can stay and defend you for a moment, but I have to know where Gloria is. I have to warn her. You've been corresponding with her, right?"

She nodded and mouthed the words, "Subway station at sixty-second and Lexington."

As soon as Adam had the information he needed, he drew his own pistol and shot both of his parents dead.

Now Gloria was the only thing tying him to dissent, the last enemy he had.

* * *

**A/N: All songs/characters (c) Green Day, except Adam, who's a product of my own demented mind. I'm not sure why he's so twisted...he and Gloria probably have some deep-rooted sibling issues they need to work out, but we won't find out about them here. Anyway, this covers East Jesus Nowhere and Peacemaker. Reviews might be nice.**


	4. Your Favorite Poison

**Chapter 4 - Your Favorite Poison  
**

Christian dragged himself back to headquarters one night on his hands and knees, barely able to stand up. His face was punched in, both his eyes blackened, and he felt like at least one of his ribs was broken.

Gloria helped him into the station, gingerly easing him into a chair and draping a blanket over him. "What the Hell happened to you?"

"Got the crap beat out of me by a policeman," he said through chattering teeth, shivering under his blanket and threadbare clothes. Gloria tilted her head and scrutinized him, taking note of the glazed, empty look in his too-wide eyes.

"That's it," she decided, "you're getting off the drugs."

"What? Why?" asked Christian, looking up at her with those big, creepy puppy-dog eyes.

"Because we're in the middle of a war, and if you keep rushing into battle all messed up like this, you're going to get killed!" said Gloria. She rummaged in her bag and tossed something into his lap: a bottle of caffeine pills. "This is your new fix. And I don't want you over the legal alcohol limit, either." As he gaped up at her in disbelief, she reached into his trouser pocket.

"Whoa! What are you—?"

"Just as I thought," she nodded as she found a needle of heroin on him. Then, much to his surprise, she asked, "Mind if I borrow this?"

"…Wait…didn't you just lecture me about the dangers of drugs?"

"Yeah. I'm not going to use it, though. Just watch."

He waited up with her until everyone else was fast asleep. He was coming back to his senses now, the pain from his beating intensifying. As the clock struck two, she walked over to one of her sleeping comrades, bent down next to him, and injected a lethal dose of heroin into his arm.

"What are you doing?" Christian gasped.

"He's a traitor," said Gloria.

"Alright, now you're just being paranoid!"

"No. I'm not." She turned him over and went through his coat pockets, turning out a number of recording devices and an anonymous letter bearing the government seal. "See? He's a con," she confirmed, pressing the needle into his hand to make it look like he'd drugged himself to death.

"Then why," asked Christian, "didn't you just kill him in front of everyone? Shouldn't you have used him as a warning for any other traitors?"

"He probably didn't want to do it," Gloria lamented, glancing down at the spasm-wracked boy. "The law has all sorts of ways to make people comply. I wouldn't trust him enough to believe him if I confronted him about it and he claimed to switch back to our side, but he deserves to die as a saint to the others."

Gloria spent several hours poring over the papers and recordings she'd found in the traitor's pockets, working into the next afternoon, studying charts and maps and newspapers, hoping to find out who he had been reporting to and eliminate that person before information about her leaked too high up the political command chain. By that night, she had a lead, and she left the station just as night fell to pursue her target. "I'll be right back," she told her ragtag band of revolutionaries.

She found her target within a few hours, and when she didn't return to the base in a reasonable time frame, Christian went out after her and found her pinned to an alley wall by the hands of her lecherous target, her jacket buttons undone, his actions totally contradicting the badge of authority pinned to his lapel. No one seemed to care, though, if the perverse enforcer attempted to violate the honorable vigilante. "Get off me!" she shrieked as she pummeled him with sharp kicks that he seemed not to notice.

"Oi! Let her go!" Christian shouted, pulling a half-loaded gun out from his belt and firing two warning shots into the man's leg. Screams ensued, the officer reached into his coat and pressed a button on a small, streamlined communicator. In seconds, the wail of sirens pervaded the air.

"Shit!" Gloria hissed. "Christian, we've got to get out of here!"

He was hardly listening, standing in place and emptying the rest of his bullets into Gloria's assailant's head. After he ran out, shots continued to blast in the vicinity: the few revolutionaries Christian had brought with him on his search-and-rescue mission were engaged in various fights with the swarm of government agents pouring copiously into the square. Screams deafened, sparks flew, bodies fell. The streets had erupted into chaos.

The riot was still in progress when a shaken Gloria and numb Christian made it back to HQ, leaving a trail of graffiti and litter and chanting protestors behind them. "Well, that didn't turn out half bad, eh?" she said, her cheeks flushed. She was rather satisfied with the outcome of the night—what had begun as a mission to protect her veil of secrecy ended with the brutality of the law enforcers for all to see and cry out against.

Christian seemed to disagree. His hands were shaking, his expression blank. "I c-can't believe I just k-killed someone," he choked through a lump in his throat.

"Oh, come on. I kill people all the time," Gloria pointed out.

"Yeah, well you're lucky you don't have a conscience then."

"Come on, Christian, don't be like this," she groaned. "What you did back there just might have saved my life!"

There was no answer. A door slammed shut towards the far interior of the station: Christian had locked himself and his tearful breakdown in the bathroom.

Gloria collapsed in a heap in a folding chair. "Well, this is just great," she muttered to herself. She'd managed to alienate the one person she actually cared about, and _he_ was the one who'd shot a man dead.

And tomorrow, despite the demonstration of collective anguish that had just commenced, society would go right back to silencing The Revolution and fearing The Man.

"What am I even doing here?"

* * *

**A/N: All songs/characters (c) Green Day. This one takes us through Last Of The American Girls and Murder City.  
**


End file.
